The Real Dope on Barry Bonds and Those Who Would Pursue Him: Part 1

The latest news that federal investigators are now allowed to make public positive steroid results – from 2003 – of Major League Baseball players is yet another attempt to find evidence, any evidence no matter how circumstantial, for a grand jury indictment of Barry Bonds. What’s at stake here is the confidentiality agreement made by the players, their union and Commissioner Bud Selig’s league offices, the credibility of a made-for-TV mini-series federal probe, the validity of three years worth of articles and a book written by two San Francisco Chronicle reporters, and untold millions of taxpayer dollars used to conduct this on-going investigation.

I have watched these happenings from the beginning. I saw the raid occur live on television and began to avidly follow the story. When suddenly Barry Bonds was implicated in the swirl of BALCO I began to save every article I could find relating to the subject. Many of the initial reports and exposes, once saved in a monstrous “Favorites” folder have been, for many reasons, removed from the Internet. However, the majority still exist waiting to be used to provide another side of this saga.

As a result of the most recent news, I feel it is time to write a many-part piece offering what I feel is a more realistic view of the motivations behind all of the BALCO-initiated events. I cannot say that I will provide a part of the story each day. I can say there will be at least one post written each week. Each post will be made accessible through individually-linked articles in the upper left corner of the left column of this blog.

I hope these writings give readers pause to consider how they are spoon-fed only the information major media outlets wish to be divulged and how that information is intended to force viewers to give up the ability to form their own opinions, their own perspectives concerning a given event.

The want, wish, and goal of these outlets like CNN, MSNBC, Fox, and ESPN, is to force you not to think at all. Good reading.

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Barry, Barry, they powers that be are really after your behind. How did you get into this mess? If you believe the myth, it began with two dudes, one white IRS agent dude, one black undercover agent, sitting in a bar watching you ball. White IRS dude sees your dark, scowling, sullen face on the screen and flips right out. He tells his black bud he knows you’re on the juice. He knows you’re a dirty, no good for the kids guy.

So the two dudes set out to get you, Barry. They stalk you with the zeal of psycho, jilted lovers. They want you so bad that black undercover agent dude visits the gym where your boy Greg Anderson works and starts to pump up. Black dude pumps and pumps and blows himself down. Really. Dude wants you so badly he kills himself – a stroke – after a pump-up sesh. His white IRS bud who instigated all this, takes up the cause as an ode to his fallen comrade and well, you know the rest. The following is from a Playboy article on the IRS hunt of Barry B.:

To White, Novitzky seemed to have an unusual interest in the ballplayer. He mentioned Bonds frequently after a sighting or a Giants game. One day at court Novitzky struck up a conversation with White that went beyond the usual talk-radio banter.

“That Bonds. He’s a great athlete,” White says Novitzky told him. “You think he’s on steroids?”

White took a moment before replying, in his bourbon-and-cotton voice, “I think they’re all on steroids. All of our top major leaguers.”

Novitzky seemed to care only about Bonds. “He’s such an asshole to the press,” he said. “I’d sure like to prove it.”

The agent, “White,” is black undercover agent dude, Iran White. The white IRS dude is Jeff Novitzky.

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If you believe the San Francisco Chronicle’s “award-winning” authors Lance Williams and Mark Fainaru-Wada, or as ESPN’s Buster Olney calls them, “The Pulitzer Prize-nominated authors” maybe you are just a by-product of an innocuous investigation that ended in a raid of an off-the-beaten-path synthetic performance-enhancing lab in Northern California. But, first thing first, Williams and Fainaru-Wada and Williams’ work on the BALCO case was not Pulitzer Prize-nominated. Oddly, it was Olney, who, in his initial reports that centered on Fainaru-Wada and Williams’ book, “Game of Shadows,” told the sporting world on ESPN News that the author’s articles, submitted to the Pulitzer by the S.F. Chronicle, never made it beyond the initial jury stage to the Pulitzer committee. Their work was deemed by the jury too based upon unsubstantiated and uncorroborated evidence and was therefore not able to be viewed as factual.

Oops.

But back to the innocuous investigation of the little lab that could…. produce track-and-field champions called Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative (BALCO). It was, according to Fainaru-Wada and Williams, a simple “enforcement action” that turned into the biggest sports scandal of the 20th century – or so the not Pulitzer Prize nominees would have the public believe:

It began with what the government called an “enforcement action” at an obscure nutrition laboratory near San Francisco International Airport.

Now, 15 months after two dozen armed agents burst into the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative — pausing in their search for evidence to view the photos of star athletes that adorned the walls — the federal probe into the suspected steroid mill called BALCO has pushed the topic of sports doping into the consciousness of even the most casual sports fan.

However, the reality of the BALCO raid is far different than the Fainaru-Wada and Williams-created myth. Again, turning to the Playboy article:

Shortly before noon on September 3, 2003, helicopters pound the air over BALCO’s tiny offices. A pack of unmarked sedans surrounds the building. In a move other agencies would later question, IRS agents are told to place IRS placards on the dashboard of their cars. Nearly two dozen agents, several in black IRS flak jackets, along with a doctor the USADA has sent, crowd through BALCO’s front door.

I wonder how many people remember the above scene; I saw the raid live on MSNBC. It was surreal. Not only were federal agent helicopters in the air but agents were sitting in the space that was a door with semi-automatic rifles pointed down on the lab. The unmarked sedans front doors were open with agents kneeling behind them, pistols pointed at the BALCO doors:

“Are these TV cameras?” [Victor Conte] asks, clearly stunned. “How did this happen?”

Many agents — everyone, in fact, who doesn’t work for the IRS — are angered by the publicity. The search of BALCO, which was supposed to remain secret for countless investigative reasons, now resembles an episode of “Cops.” Members of other law enforcement groups are furious at the publicity stunt. The search was designed as a pressure tactic, not as the end of the investigation; there are no plans to arrest Conte, who walks free.

The date, September 3, 2003 is important because the two Chronicle reporters who became famous as a result of the bust didn’t write their first BALCO story until December 21. 2003. That first article titled, “Sports and Drugs: How the doping scandal unfolded. Fallout from BALCO Probe could taint Olympics, pro sports” made no mention of the IRS and federal agents’ police reality show-like atmosphere that was the BALCO raid.

What chemicals were confiscated from BALCO by federal agents as a direct result of the raid illustrates the true lack of importance of BALCO relative to the designer steroid world of elite professional athletes. Taken from the lab were vials, and pills. The vials, no more than a dozen of them mainly contained supplements in liquid form and two out-of-date vials (by about 10 years) of a horse steroid. The pills were all the Zinc-Magnesium compound touted by Conte as a performance-enhancing mineral supplement. No THG, clear, cream, or other commonly-used steroid or performance-enhancing drugs were confiscated from Conte’s laboratory.

Think of that. Nothing illegal in the way of performance-enhancing drugs was confiscated from the BALCO offices.

Instead of immediately asking why the probe continued without physical evidence or asking why and how IRS agents were able to enter BALCO without a warrant, or instead of asking myriad questions dealing with government improprieties in relation to the BALCO bust, Fainaru-Wada and Williams show their hand immediately, show who they decided this case would center around, who they would attempt to publicly hang. Come hell or high water, whether right or wrong, and no matter how they had to spin the story Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams, like Jeff Novizky and Iran White, were going to take Barry Bonds down. The initial paragraphs of their initial BALCO story elucidate their goal:

Barry Bonds hit a career-high 49 home runs during the 2000 season, but within days of the last game, he set his sights on 2001. A contract year lay ahead for the aging left fielder, a chance to regain the status of baseball’s highest paid player.

Bonds already was doing weight training with Greg Anderson, his boyhood friend. Anderson took him to see Victor Conte, a self-taught scientist who boasted he could propel top-level athletes to peak performance through an unconventional mix of blood analysis and nutritional supplements.

The outfielder returned the next season bigger and stronger. The results are etched in baseball’s record books — and, perhaps, in a transcript of the secret proceedings of a federal grand jury convened in San Francisco this fall.

For while Bonds’ alliance with the weight trainer and the nutritionist may have helped him hit 73 home runs in 2001 — breaking baseball’s most storied record and persuading the Giants to offer him a $90 million contract – – it also involved him in what may become the worst sports doping scandal of a generation.

It is a scandal involving high-tech designer steroids and masking agents, human growth hormone and suspected money laundering, drugs with code names like “the cream” and “the clear,” and a mystery chemist who concocted a new performance-enhancing drug called THG.

And with these introductory paragraphs, Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams zeroed in and identified their prey – and had visions of the Pulitzer dancing in their heads.

(Part 2: Steroid disinformation becomes truth.)

In a Stretch, Feds Reach for Barry Bonds Once Again

Barry Bonds continues to be dogged by a farcical federal investigation thinly-veiled as the BALCO probe. The following is from a Houston Chronicle News Services article:

…federal investigators can now use the names and urine samples of about 100 Major League Baseball players in their steroids probe, following a ruling Wednesday from a federal appeals court.

The 2-1 decision by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned three lower court decisions and could help authorities pinpoint the source of steroids in baseball. It could also bolster the perjury case against Bonds, who is under investigation for telling a grand jury he never knowingly used performance-enhancing drugs.

Apparently the goal of this decision is to uncover more athletes who worked with Barry Bonds’ ex-strength trainer and long-time friend, Greg Anderson. The feds somehow feel that if enough MLB players worked with Anderson they can use this as circumstantial, albeit weak, evidence to bring perjury charges against Bonds.

Armed with data from both labs, government officials now can match the positive test samples with the players’ names. Those players then could be called before a grand jury and asked how they obtained their steroids.

If enough testify that they got the drugs from Bonds’ personal trainer, Greg Anderson, it could undermine Bonds’ claim that he didn’t know Anderson was supplying him with illegal substances.

The courts have now gone beyond attempting to trample on the feats of Bonds. They have infringed on agreed to rights of every MLB player.

The question is, how do Major League Baseball players trust their union now that an appeals court has ruled that their steroid tests taken in 2002, which were conducted under promise the of confidentiality, are to be made public.

(I’ll have much more on this soon.)