Dave Zirin http://www.thenation.com/blog/159935/great-american-witch-hunt-how-barry-bonds-became-convicted-felon
This wasn’t supposed to happen in Barack Obama’s America. We were told that these sorts of prosecutions wouldn’t be the priority of an Eric Holder Justice Department. But just as Guantanamo Bay detention centers and military tribunals have remained in place, the perjury witch-hunt trial of Major League Baseball’s home run king, Barry Lamar Bonds, continued unabated and has now reached a predictably ugly conclusion.
After seven years, and millions of dollars in court costs, Bonds has been found guilty of obstruction of justice. As for the all-important three perjury charges, the jury couldn’t agree whether Bonds lied to a grand jury investigating the Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative (BALCO) when he swore under oath that he never knowingly took performance enhancing drugs. Without corroborating evidence from Bonds’s trainer and lifelong friend Greg Anderson, the jury could was deadlocked and the Judge declared a mistrial on all perjury charges. But the obstruction of justice conviction makes Bonds a convicted felon, and sets him up for a May 20th hearing where he could get as many as 10 years behind bars.
What did Bonds do to “obstruct justice”? According to one juror, “Steve,” the obstruction of justice charge was reached because, "The whole grand jury testimony was a series of evasive answers. There were pointed questions that were asked two or three or four different ways that never got clearly answered. That's how we came to that.'' Wow. Apparently, a “series of evasive answers” lines you up for a 10-year sentence behind bars. By that standard, Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, and Scooter Libby should be breaking rocks in Leavenworth for their performance at the Valerie Plame trial.
As BALCO founder Victor Conte - who is no friend of Bonds - said to USA Today, "This verdict absolutely makes no sense to me. Of all of these counts, the one that makes the least sense to me is the obstruction charge. Tell me how there was obstruction of justice. This is all about the selected persecution of Barry Bonds. This is not fair. I was the heavy in this. I accepted full responsibility and the consequences and went to prison. How is that obstruction? Doesn't make sense.”
It doesn’t. After all the public money, drama, and hysterics, this is what we’re left with. He was “evasive." Keep in mind that we live in a country where the US Department of Justice has not pursued one person for the investment banking fraud that cratered the US economy in 2008. Not one indictment has been issued to a single Bush official on charges of ordering torture or lying to provoke an invasion of Iraq. Instead, we get farcical reality television like the US vs Barry Bonds.
This was a trial where you longed for the somber dignity of a Judge Judy. Since Anderson wouldn’t talk, the government was left with two real witnesses: Kimberly Bell, Bonds mistress, brought in to discuss his sexual dysfunctions resulting from steroids, and Steve Hoskins, the business manager whom Bonds fired for alleged theft and fraud. But their real star was a once-anonymous IRS official named Jeff Novitsky, who has proudly seen Bonds as an all-consuming obsession, U.S. Constitution be damned.
ESPN legal expert Lester Munson described the verdict as “a major triumph for federal agent Jeff Novitzky.” That alone should chill our bones. Without a warrant, Novitzky started his BALCO investigation by rooting through Victor Conte’s trash and taking it back to his house to sift through in his leisure hours. But Conte was a nothing to Novitzky. From the beginning, his sights were on Barry Bonds.
Jonathan Littman of Yahoo! Sports wrote, “two agents working on the case knew that Novitzky ‘hated' Bonds, and heard him brag about his hopes to cash in on a book deal. The agents demanded to see copies of his reports and were rebuffed by federal officials. Novitzky, however, was given carte blanche by the head of the IRS to drop the normal duties of an IRS agent -- investigating tax fraud and money laundering -- and became our de facto national sports doping czar.”
In 2004, accompanied by eleven agents, Novitsky marched into the offices of sports-drug testing monolith Comprehensive Drug Testing. Carrying a warrant which authorized him to see the sealed drug tests of just ten baseball players, he paraded out with 4,000 supposedly confidential medical files, including records for every baseball player in the Major leagues. As Jon Pessah wrote in ESPN the Magazine, "Three federal judges reviewed the raid. One asked, incredulously, if the Fourth Amendment had been repealed. Another, Susan Illston, who has presided over the BALCO trials, called Novitzky's actions a 'callous disregard' for constitutional rights. All three instructed him to return the records. Instead, Novitzky kept the evidence..."
During closing arguments, Bonds’s attorney, Cristina Arguedas, looked at the jury as she pointed at the prosecution, accused them of misconduct and asked, "Why are we even here?"
It’s a good question. But asking the question is much safer than answering it. We’re here because Major League Baseball and the US government has long decided that Barry Bonds would shoulder the burden for the steroid era. We’re here because a surly Black athlete who thinks that the press is just a step above vermin was easy pickings for an industry rife with systemic corruption. Major League Baseball made billions off of the steroid era, an era many now see as a rancid, tainted lie. It was an era where owners became obscenely wealthy and billions in public funds were spent on ballparks. The press cheered and America dug the long ball. Now the dust has cleared, our cities have been looted, Barry Bonds could be going to prison, and Commissioner Bud Selig still has a job - and a RAISE. With apologies to Harvey Dent, this is the story of the Black athlete today: die a hero or live long enough to be a villain. And the men in the suits walk – or in Selig’s case, slouch - all the way to the bank.
Around the start of the trial, nearly a decade ago, Bonds said, "This is something we, as African-American athletes, live with every day. I don't need a headline that says, 'Bonds says there's racism in the game of baseball.' We all know it. It's just that some people don't want to admit it. They're going to play dumb like they don't know what the hell is going on." We shouldn’t play dumb either. Both President Obama and Attorney General Holder said words to the effect that the US government would no longer be in the steroid-inspection business. Like so much else in the last two years, it was just words.
Dave Zirin is the author of “Bad Sports: How Owners are Ruining the Games we Love” (Scribner) and just made the new documentary “Not Just a Game.” Receive his column every week by emailing dave@edgeofsports.com. Contact him at edgeofsports@gmail.com.
Showing posts with label BALCO. Show all posts
Showing posts with label BALCO. Show all posts
Thursday, April 28, 2011
Friday, February 27, 2009
The US v. Barry Bonds
The US v. Barry Bonds
By Dave Zirin
This is a story about garbage. There's the actual garbage overzealous federal investigators examined in their efforts to prosecute a surly sports celebrity. There's the shredding of the Bill of Rights, crudely ignored by the government in the name of obsession and ambition. Finally, there's the thorough trashing of people's reputations, not to mention the game of baseball. Welcome to The US v. Barry Bonds ; please disregard the stench.
The trial to prove that slugger Barry Bonds perjured himself in the Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative (BALCO) steroid investigation begins March 2. Yet after seven years of investigation, millions of dollars in work hours and countless ruined reputations, the US Attorney's Office will arrive in court with virtually no leg to stand on. Judge Susan Illston struck down most of the prosecution's case, a move ESPN legal expert Lester Munson called a "devastating" setback for prosecutors. The ruling was an indictment of not only the government's case but its entire approach toward Bonds from day one.
John Ashcroft's Justice Department always seemed irrationally determined to prosecute Bonds. It was as obsessive as the fisherman Santiago attempting to bring home the great marlin in Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea . The embodiment of this obsession was IRS agent Jeff Novitzky. He broke open the BALCO case after spending a great deal of time, to the adulation of the press, literally sifting through the company's garbage and sewage.
Novitzky was given the green light by President Bush and Ashcroft to go for the jugular. In 2004, accompanied by eleven agents, he marched into Comprehensive Drug Testing, the nation's largest sports-drug testing company. Armed with a warrant to see the confidential drug tests of ten baseball players, he walked out with 4,000 supposedly sealed medical files, including every baseball player in the major leagues. As Jon Pessah wrote in ESPN magazine, "Three federal judges reviewed the raid. One asked, incredulously, if the Fourth Amendment had been repealed. Another, Susan Illston, who has presided over the BALCO trials, called Novitzky's actions a 'callous disregard' for constitutional rights. All three instructed him to return the records. Instead, Novitzky kept the evidence...."
It was a frightening abuse of power, all aimed at imprisoning a prominent African-American athlete. Yet despite the landfills of trash, the government's case always rested on a flimsy premise. Bonds's contention under oath was that anything illegal he may have ingested was without prior knowledge. The only person who could contradict Bonds was his trainer and longtime friend Greg Anderson. The government pressed Anderson to give testimony. He refused, citing a promise made by the feds that he wouldn't have to testify after pleading guilty to steroid distribution and money laundering in 2005. The feds stuck him in jail for thirteen months to soften him up, but he didn't crack.
Anderson has remained firm even though in January, twenty FBI and IRS agents raided the home of his mother-in-law and threatened to punish her for tax evasion if Anderson didn't spill. Similar threats have been made against his wife. Mark Geragos, Anderson's attorney, told Yahoo Sports, "It's such a blatant and transparent attempt to intimidate Greg. They're acting like the Gestapo. Even the mafia spares the women and children." Without Anderson, the state's case was always weak. But now itis on serious life support. Illston ruled most of Novitzky and the government's case inadmissible, for good reason.
The prosecution wanted to submit a surreptitiously recorded statement from Anderson as well as notations on what it calls his "drug calendar," even though he would not testify to authenticate any of the evidence. Illston, to her credit, said no dice and declared those items inadmissible. The government has raised the specter of jailing Anderson again, but Illston remarked in a "raised voice" that jailing someone twice for refusing to testify would be beyond the pale.
The government is hinting that it will appeal Illston's ruling, but that would indefinitely delay the trial. If the US Attorney's Office does continue the case, it has made clear its next line of offense: it will have Bonds's former mistress, Kimberly Bell, testify in detail about the alleged "shriveling" of Bonds's testicles. Jeff Novitzky should be proud.
It's way past time to say enough is enough.
Whether or not you are a Barry Bonds fan, or consider him to be just a step above a seal-clubbing, pit bull-fighting bank executive, every person of good conscience should be aghast at the way the Justice Department has gone about its business. Barry Bonds, Greg Anderson and maybe thousands of others have had their rights trampled on, all for the glory of a perjury case that looks to be going absolutely nowhere. Attorney General Eric Holder and President Obama have strongly indicated that the government is getting out of the steroid monitoring business. That is welcome, but after so many years, so many tax dollars and so many reputations destroyed, it all feels positively Pyrrhic.
At the end of The Old Man and the Sea, when Santiago finally returns to shore, his 18-foot catch has been reduced to a skeleton. A crowd gathers to gawk and imagine what the magnificent marlin once was. Santiago completed his journey with nothing, but he felt purified for the battle and slept deeply and proudly. As we pick through the bones of Barry Bonds, I can't imagine Jeff Novitzky feels the same.
Dave Zirin is the author of “A People’s History of Sports in the United States” (The New Press) Receive his column every week by emailing dave@edgeofsports.com. Contact him at edgeofsports@gmail.com .
By Dave Zirin
This is a story about garbage. There's the actual garbage overzealous federal investigators examined in their efforts to prosecute a surly sports celebrity. There's the shredding of the Bill of Rights, crudely ignored by the government in the name of obsession and ambition. Finally, there's the thorough trashing of people's reputations, not to mention the game of baseball. Welcome to The US v. Barry Bonds ; please disregard the stench.
The trial to prove that slugger Barry Bonds perjured himself in the Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative (BALCO) steroid investigation begins March 2. Yet after seven years of investigation, millions of dollars in work hours and countless ruined reputations, the US Attorney's Office will arrive in court with virtually no leg to stand on. Judge Susan Illston struck down most of the prosecution's case, a move ESPN legal expert Lester Munson called a "devastating" setback for prosecutors. The ruling was an indictment of not only the government's case but its entire approach toward Bonds from day one.
John Ashcroft's Justice Department always seemed irrationally determined to prosecute Bonds. It was as obsessive as the fisherman Santiago attempting to bring home the great marlin in Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea . The embodiment of this obsession was IRS agent Jeff Novitzky. He broke open the BALCO case after spending a great deal of time, to the adulation of the press, literally sifting through the company's garbage and sewage.
Novitzky was given the green light by President Bush and Ashcroft to go for the jugular. In 2004, accompanied by eleven agents, he marched into Comprehensive Drug Testing, the nation's largest sports-drug testing company. Armed with a warrant to see the confidential drug tests of ten baseball players, he walked out with 4,000 supposedly sealed medical files, including every baseball player in the major leagues. As Jon Pessah wrote in ESPN magazine, "Three federal judges reviewed the raid. One asked, incredulously, if the Fourth Amendment had been repealed. Another, Susan Illston, who has presided over the BALCO trials, called Novitzky's actions a 'callous disregard' for constitutional rights. All three instructed him to return the records. Instead, Novitzky kept the evidence...."
It was a frightening abuse of power, all aimed at imprisoning a prominent African-American athlete. Yet despite the landfills of trash, the government's case always rested on a flimsy premise. Bonds's contention under oath was that anything illegal he may have ingested was without prior knowledge. The only person who could contradict Bonds was his trainer and longtime friend Greg Anderson. The government pressed Anderson to give testimony. He refused, citing a promise made by the feds that he wouldn't have to testify after pleading guilty to steroid distribution and money laundering in 2005. The feds stuck him in jail for thirteen months to soften him up, but he didn't crack.
Anderson has remained firm even though in January, twenty FBI and IRS agents raided the home of his mother-in-law and threatened to punish her for tax evasion if Anderson didn't spill. Similar threats have been made against his wife. Mark Geragos, Anderson's attorney, told Yahoo Sports, "It's such a blatant and transparent attempt to intimidate Greg. They're acting like the Gestapo. Even the mafia spares the women and children." Without Anderson, the state's case was always weak. But now itis on serious life support. Illston ruled most of Novitzky and the government's case inadmissible, for good reason.
The prosecution wanted to submit a surreptitiously recorded statement from Anderson as well as notations on what it calls his "drug calendar," even though he would not testify to authenticate any of the evidence. Illston, to her credit, said no dice and declared those items inadmissible. The government has raised the specter of jailing Anderson again, but Illston remarked in a "raised voice" that jailing someone twice for refusing to testify would be beyond the pale.
The government is hinting that it will appeal Illston's ruling, but that would indefinitely delay the trial. If the US Attorney's Office does continue the case, it has made clear its next line of offense: it will have Bonds's former mistress, Kimberly Bell, testify in detail about the alleged "shriveling" of Bonds's testicles. Jeff Novitzky should be proud.
It's way past time to say enough is enough.
Whether or not you are a Barry Bonds fan, or consider him to be just a step above a seal-clubbing, pit bull-fighting bank executive, every person of good conscience should be aghast at the way the Justice Department has gone about its business. Barry Bonds, Greg Anderson and maybe thousands of others have had their rights trampled on, all for the glory of a perjury case that looks to be going absolutely nowhere. Attorney General Eric Holder and President Obama have strongly indicated that the government is getting out of the steroid monitoring business. That is welcome, but after so many years, so many tax dollars and so many reputations destroyed, it all feels positively Pyrrhic.
At the end of The Old Man and the Sea, when Santiago finally returns to shore, his 18-foot catch has been reduced to a skeleton. A crowd gathers to gawk and imagine what the magnificent marlin once was. Santiago completed his journey with nothing, but he felt purified for the battle and slept deeply and proudly. As we pick through the bones of Barry Bonds, I can't imagine Jeff Novitzky feels the same.
Dave Zirin is the author of “A People’s History of Sports in the United States” (The New Press) Receive his column every week by emailing dave@edgeofsports.com. Contact him at edgeofsports@gmail.com .
Sunday, February 15, 2009
A-Rod, Anabolic Agonist Sports
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090223/zirin
A-Rod, Anabolic Agonist Sports
By Dave Zirin
February 9, 2009
Should we pity Alex Rodriguez? The three-time MVP, owed $275 million over the next nine years, has been exposed as a steroid user, the latest in Major League Baseball's endless series of anabolic agonists. The creative minds at the New York Post summed up the mood of the moment with one blaring headline: "A-Fraud." ESPN senior writer Jayson Stark was no less overwrought; his headline proclaimed, "A- Rod Has Destroyed Game's History."
However, the list of frauds and history defamers extends far beyond the Yankee third baseman. Before we gather the torches and pitchforks, let us round up some of the real villains. When it comes to steroids, no one, as A-Rod's alleged paramour Madonna might say, is like a virgin. For instance, there's league commissioner Bud Selig, who touted A-Rod as the man who would replace the "unclean" Barry Bonds as the all-time leader in home runs. Then there is the Major League Baseball Players Association. Once arguably the most powerful union in the United States, the MLBPA has in its possession the infamous list of 104 players tested in 2003. That year a deal between the owners and the union was supposed to be based on anonymity and trust. If more than 5 percent of the players tested positive, more testing with suspensions would ensue. The union promised its members that it would destroy the list. Instead it inexplicably held onto the list long enough for the government to seize it for the BALCO investigations.
New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the Steinbrenner family also have anabolic egg on their faces. They were depending on A-Rod to be the cherry atop the sundae of the new billion-dollar Yankee Stadium expected to open this year. Hundreds of millions in taxpayer dollars have gone into this public works project, with specious promises of economic renewal. Now it may just set the stage for a season-long, agonizing fall from grace.
Finally, there are the owners-at-large, who have yet to have to face any kind of Congressional subcommittee, grand jury or operatic media melodrama for their role in cheapening the sport. Stark, in his piece blaming A-Rod for shredding the very fabric of baseball history, writes:
In baseball, we love our numbers. And we love our heroes. And that brings us to Alex Rodriguez, a man who has committed a crime he doesn't even understand: a crime against the once-proud history of his sport.
What Stark and his misguided minions ignore is that if we are upset about the way numbers and hallowed records have become cheapened over the past fifteen years, ownership is the problem--and it extends far beyond steroids.
Owners actually had a multifaceted strategy to try to make baseball more like beer-league softball--and it was about as subtle as a tabloid's back page. As legendary baseball writer Bob Klapisch said, "Somewhere someone decided that baseball needed more runs. It was made at a very fundamental level. And little by little, step by step, this became the new reality. There has been too much to write it off as coincidence."
The reasons for the home run boom extend far beyond the steroid dealer. The boom reverberates in every urban budget, every underfunded school and every library that closes early. In the past twenty years, more than fifteen publicly funded baseball parks have been built in the United States. They are supposed to be fan-friendly--that is, unless your child happens to go to a school whose shrinking budgets were paying the tab. The shorter fences at these parks are engineered to yield more home runs.
Then there are the balls and bats. Countless baseball insiders believe that the ball is now wound tighter than it was twenty years ago. As for the bats, as recently as fifteen years ago, players used untreated ash bats. Now the bats are maple and lacquered. That means the ball goes farther.
Then there is the strike zone. The area where a pitched ball can be called a strike has shrunk, in the words of retired pitcher Greg Maddux, to "the size of a postage stamp." The owners consciously engineered this trend toward the microscopic strike zone. When umpires refused to agree to a uniform strike zone, Major League Baseball crushed their union and instituted a machine to monitor their abilities. Hall of Fame pitcher Jim Palmer said, "The loss of the high strike has changed the game more than any pill."
But an equally big reason home run numbers are up is that the game finally shed its nineteenth-century view of strength conditioning. The training standard until the 1990s was that if Joe "Ducky" Medwick didn't do it in the '30s, then it shouldn't be done. For example, it has been the conventional wisdom for most of baseball's history that weightlifting would destroy your swing. Many teams even fined or suspended players if they were caught pumping iron. Weightlifting is now as much a part of every team's regimen as shagging fly balls.
Alex Rodriguez is set to be the next former slugger torn to pieces by columnists, fans and the sports radio blabbocracy. They all need to crack open some Michael Phelps medicinal magic and relax. Rodriguez may not deserve your pity, but he hardly deserves your scorn. Reserve that for the owners, political leaders and Bud the commissioner--who robbed our cities blind and distracted us with dingers so we wouldn't notice.
Dave Zirin is the author of Welcome to the Terrordome: the Pain Politics and Promise of Sports (Haymarket) and the forthcoming A People's History of Sports in the United States (The New Press). and his writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, SportsIllustrated.com, New York Newsday and The Progressive. He is the host of XM Radio's Edge of Sports Radio.
Contact him at edgeofsports@gmail.com.
A-Rod, Anabolic Agonist Sports
By Dave Zirin
February 9, 2009
Should we pity Alex Rodriguez? The three-time MVP, owed $275 million over the next nine years, has been exposed as a steroid user, the latest in Major League Baseball's endless series of anabolic agonists. The creative minds at the New York Post summed up the mood of the moment with one blaring headline: "A-Fraud." ESPN senior writer Jayson Stark was no less overwrought; his headline proclaimed, "A- Rod Has Destroyed Game's History."
However, the list of frauds and history defamers extends far beyond the Yankee third baseman. Before we gather the torches and pitchforks, let us round up some of the real villains. When it comes to steroids, no one, as A-Rod's alleged paramour Madonna might say, is like a virgin. For instance, there's league commissioner Bud Selig, who touted A-Rod as the man who would replace the "unclean" Barry Bonds as the all-time leader in home runs. Then there is the Major League Baseball Players Association. Once arguably the most powerful union in the United States, the MLBPA has in its possession the infamous list of 104 players tested in 2003. That year a deal between the owners and the union was supposed to be based on anonymity and trust. If more than 5 percent of the players tested positive, more testing with suspensions would ensue. The union promised its members that it would destroy the list. Instead it inexplicably held onto the list long enough for the government to seize it for the BALCO investigations.
New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the Steinbrenner family also have anabolic egg on their faces. They were depending on A-Rod to be the cherry atop the sundae of the new billion-dollar Yankee Stadium expected to open this year. Hundreds of millions in taxpayer dollars have gone into this public works project, with specious promises of economic renewal. Now it may just set the stage for a season-long, agonizing fall from grace.
Finally, there are the owners-at-large, who have yet to have to face any kind of Congressional subcommittee, grand jury or operatic media melodrama for their role in cheapening the sport. Stark, in his piece blaming A-Rod for shredding the very fabric of baseball history, writes:
In baseball, we love our numbers. And we love our heroes. And that brings us to Alex Rodriguez, a man who has committed a crime he doesn't even understand: a crime against the once-proud history of his sport.
What Stark and his misguided minions ignore is that if we are upset about the way numbers and hallowed records have become cheapened over the past fifteen years, ownership is the problem--and it extends far beyond steroids.
Owners actually had a multifaceted strategy to try to make baseball more like beer-league softball--and it was about as subtle as a tabloid's back page. As legendary baseball writer Bob Klapisch said, "Somewhere someone decided that baseball needed more runs. It was made at a very fundamental level. And little by little, step by step, this became the new reality. There has been too much to write it off as coincidence."
The reasons for the home run boom extend far beyond the steroid dealer. The boom reverberates in every urban budget, every underfunded school and every library that closes early. In the past twenty years, more than fifteen publicly funded baseball parks have been built in the United States. They are supposed to be fan-friendly--that is, unless your child happens to go to a school whose shrinking budgets were paying the tab. The shorter fences at these parks are engineered to yield more home runs.
Then there are the balls and bats. Countless baseball insiders believe that the ball is now wound tighter than it was twenty years ago. As for the bats, as recently as fifteen years ago, players used untreated ash bats. Now the bats are maple and lacquered. That means the ball goes farther.
Then there is the strike zone. The area where a pitched ball can be called a strike has shrunk, in the words of retired pitcher Greg Maddux, to "the size of a postage stamp." The owners consciously engineered this trend toward the microscopic strike zone. When umpires refused to agree to a uniform strike zone, Major League Baseball crushed their union and instituted a machine to monitor their abilities. Hall of Fame pitcher Jim Palmer said, "The loss of the high strike has changed the game more than any pill."
But an equally big reason home run numbers are up is that the game finally shed its nineteenth-century view of strength conditioning. The training standard until the 1990s was that if Joe "Ducky" Medwick didn't do it in the '30s, then it shouldn't be done. For example, it has been the conventional wisdom for most of baseball's history that weightlifting would destroy your swing. Many teams even fined or suspended players if they were caught pumping iron. Weightlifting is now as much a part of every team's regimen as shagging fly balls.
Alex Rodriguez is set to be the next former slugger torn to pieces by columnists, fans and the sports radio blabbocracy. They all need to crack open some Michael Phelps medicinal magic and relax. Rodriguez may not deserve your pity, but he hardly deserves your scorn. Reserve that for the owners, political leaders and Bud the commissioner--who robbed our cities blind and distracted us with dingers so we wouldn't notice.
Dave Zirin is the author of Welcome to the Terrordome: the Pain Politics and Promise of Sports (Haymarket) and the forthcoming A People's History of Sports in the United States (The New Press). and his writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, SportsIllustrated.com, New York Newsday and The Progressive. He is the host of XM Radio's Edge of Sports Radio.
Contact him at edgeofsports@gmail.com.
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
Positive Drug Tests in Bonds Case
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/05/sports/baseball/05bonds.html
February 5, 2009
Positive Drug Tests in Bonds Case
By MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT
The government’s perjury case against Barry Bonds gained vivid detail on Wednesday when more than 200 pages of evidence were unsealed. The pages included documents tying Bonds to four positive tests for steroids, calendars that prosecutors described as doping schedules, and a transcript of a recorded conversation in which Bonds’s former trainer is quoted as saying that he injected Bonds with performance-enhancing drugs.
Three urine samples that were sent for testing in 2000 and 2001 by the Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative showed the presence of anabolic steroids, according to the documents. A fourth test from a 2003 sample collected by Major League Baseball showed the presence of the designer steroid THG, the fertility drug clomid and a form of testosterone not naturally produced by the body.
When tested under Major League Baseball’s program, that sample came back negative for performance-enhancing drugs. But after the sample was seized in a 2004 raid by federal agents, it was retested by the U.C.L.A. Olympic Analytical Laboratory, with a different and, for Bonds, potentially troublesome result.
Not all of the information provided in the unsealed documents is new. But the documents provide a more complete portrait of the evidence that federal prosecutors have gathered on Bonds since the investigation of Balco began in 2002. Bonds is scheduled to go on trial March 2 in San Francisco on charges that he committed perjury in 2003 when he told the grand jury investigating Balco that he never knowingly used performance-enhancing drugs.
Bonds’s lawyers filed a motion two weeks ago to have much of the evidence in the case excluded, arguing that it could not be authenticated. As part of that motion, the defense lawyers filed the evidence in dispute under seal, not wishing for it to be revealed. But United States District Judge Susan Illston ordered that it be made public and has scheduled a hearing for Thursday about its admissibility.
“While it may seem damning now, the judge may exclude a lot of the evidence and it may never make it before the jury,” said Carl Tobias, a professor of law at the University of Richmond, in assessing the new information about the case. “But with all the attention being given to the case, the judge is going to have to be extra careful that the jury she seats has not been prejudiced by this information.”
Among the most intriguing sections in the unsealed documents is a description of what authorities said was a tape-recorded conversation, made in 2003, between Bonds’s former business manager, Steve Hoskins, and Bonds’s longtime trainer, Greg Anderson. Anderson spent more than a year in prison on contempt-of-court charges for refusing to testify before the grand jury investigating Bonds.
According to a summary of the tape and a partial transcript, Anderson told Hoskins that he had injected Bonds with performance-enhancing drugs and that they were not detectable under baseball’s drug-testing program at the time. Anderson also told Hoskins that he had advance notice of when the drug tests would be conducted.
“I’ll know like probably a week in advance, or two weeks in advance,” Anderson is quoted as telling Hoskins in the transcript. According to the documents, Hoskins was recording the conversation, which took place in the Giants’ clubhouse, because Bonds’s father, Bobby, did not believe his son was using steroids.
Hoskins and Bonds were childhood friends who became particularly close after Bonds returned to San Francisco to play for the Giants in 1993. The two had a falling out in 2003 and Hoskins later cooperated with federal authorities, telling them that Bonds flew into “roid rages.” In the partial transcript, Hoskins is quoted as asking Anderson if the drugs being given to Bonds were the same “that Marion Jones and them were using.”
“Yeah, same stuff, the same stuff that worked at the Olympics,” Anderson is quoted as saying.
And, Anderson added for emphasis, Olympians were tested every week. “So that’s why I know it works,” Anderson is quoted as saying. (Jones, an Olympic gold-medal winner, pleaded guilty in 2007 to making false statements about her use of performance-enhancing drugs and received a six-month prison sentence.)
Although the results of the three urine samples that Balco tested in 2000 and 2001 do not have Bonds’s name on them, prosecutors say they can be connected to handwritten notes seized at Balco and Anderson’s home in 2003. Those notes display the names of Bonds and other individuals and numbers that, prosecutors say, correlate to samples that Balco sent for drug testing. Prosecutors contend that the three tests show Bonds tested positive for two steroids — methenolone and nandrolone — in November 2000 and February 2001.
But in their 28-page motion to exclude evidence, Bonds’s lawyers said: “It appears that as to every proffered test result, the government can attempt to link Mr. Bonds to the sample in question only through purported hearsay statement of Anderson.”
In all, five pages of handwritten notes are attributed to Anderson, and in disputing them, the defense states: “The notes are barely comprehensible. Their author(s) are unknown as are the time and purpose of their preparation.”
The defense lawyers said the notes were indicative “of the government’s zeal to convict Mr. Bonds by any means at all.” They also said the doping calendars, which the prosecutors say Anderson created so he could monitor Bonds’s use of drugs, should not be admissible, either.
The fourth positive steroid test cited in the documents does not involve Anderson or his notes. Instead, it stems from the anonymous drug tests that were conducted by Major League Baseball in 2003, the first year of steroid testing on the major league level. There were no penalties for positive results, and not even the players were supposed to know how their tests came out.
Bonds’s urine sample did not produce a positive test under baseball’s guidelines. But in a raid in 2004, authorities seized the samples and test results of Bonds and the nine other players who had testified before the Balco grand jury. Two years later, the U.C.L.A. laboratory that retested Bonds’s sample concluded that it contained the designer steroid THG, known as “the clear”; clomid, an anti-estrogen drug used to stimulate natural testosterone levels; and the presence of testosterone not naturally made by the body.
Baseball did not test for THG in 2003 and did not begin testing for clomid until the 2007 season. Why Bonds did not test positive for testosterone in 2003 is not clear.
When Bonds testified before the Balco grand jury in 2003, he said that he had used the “clear” and the “cream,” a lotion with epitestosterone and testosterone, but did not believe they were performance-enhancing drugs. He said he believed the “clear” was flaxseed oil and that the “cream” was a balm for arthritis. He said he used the “cream” sparingly.
The New York Times reported last week that federal authorities had detected a steroid other than the “clear” and the “cream” in a urine sample from Bonds. The documents unsealed Wednesday said that testosterone had been detected in Bonds’s 2003 sample, but did not say whether the source was the “cream” or another anabolic steroid.
“You cannot tell from a urine analysis whether a person has used the cream or has been using other sources of testosterone, like gels, patches or injectables,” said Dr. Gary I. Wadler, an antidoping expert and member of the World Anti-Doping Agency.
The documents also included a 2006 letter from Commissioner Bud Selig to Bonds notifying him of a first-time positive test for amphetamines, which does not result in a suspension. The test result does not appear to be directly related to the perjury case.
February 5, 2009
Positive Drug Tests in Bonds Case
By MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT
The government’s perjury case against Barry Bonds gained vivid detail on Wednesday when more than 200 pages of evidence were unsealed. The pages included documents tying Bonds to four positive tests for steroids, calendars that prosecutors described as doping schedules, and a transcript of a recorded conversation in which Bonds’s former trainer is quoted as saying that he injected Bonds with performance-enhancing drugs.
Three urine samples that were sent for testing in 2000 and 2001 by the Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative showed the presence of anabolic steroids, according to the documents. A fourth test from a 2003 sample collected by Major League Baseball showed the presence of the designer steroid THG, the fertility drug clomid and a form of testosterone not naturally produced by the body.
When tested under Major League Baseball’s program, that sample came back negative for performance-enhancing drugs. But after the sample was seized in a 2004 raid by federal agents, it was retested by the U.C.L.A. Olympic Analytical Laboratory, with a different and, for Bonds, potentially troublesome result.
Not all of the information provided in the unsealed documents is new. But the documents provide a more complete portrait of the evidence that federal prosecutors have gathered on Bonds since the investigation of Balco began in 2002. Bonds is scheduled to go on trial March 2 in San Francisco on charges that he committed perjury in 2003 when he told the grand jury investigating Balco that he never knowingly used performance-enhancing drugs.
Bonds’s lawyers filed a motion two weeks ago to have much of the evidence in the case excluded, arguing that it could not be authenticated. As part of that motion, the defense lawyers filed the evidence in dispute under seal, not wishing for it to be revealed. But United States District Judge Susan Illston ordered that it be made public and has scheduled a hearing for Thursday about its admissibility.
“While it may seem damning now, the judge may exclude a lot of the evidence and it may never make it before the jury,” said Carl Tobias, a professor of law at the University of Richmond, in assessing the new information about the case. “But with all the attention being given to the case, the judge is going to have to be extra careful that the jury she seats has not been prejudiced by this information.”
Among the most intriguing sections in the unsealed documents is a description of what authorities said was a tape-recorded conversation, made in 2003, between Bonds’s former business manager, Steve Hoskins, and Bonds’s longtime trainer, Greg Anderson. Anderson spent more than a year in prison on contempt-of-court charges for refusing to testify before the grand jury investigating Bonds.
According to a summary of the tape and a partial transcript, Anderson told Hoskins that he had injected Bonds with performance-enhancing drugs and that they were not detectable under baseball’s drug-testing program at the time. Anderson also told Hoskins that he had advance notice of when the drug tests would be conducted.
“I’ll know like probably a week in advance, or two weeks in advance,” Anderson is quoted as telling Hoskins in the transcript. According to the documents, Hoskins was recording the conversation, which took place in the Giants’ clubhouse, because Bonds’s father, Bobby, did not believe his son was using steroids.
Hoskins and Bonds were childhood friends who became particularly close after Bonds returned to San Francisco to play for the Giants in 1993. The two had a falling out in 2003 and Hoskins later cooperated with federal authorities, telling them that Bonds flew into “roid rages.” In the partial transcript, Hoskins is quoted as asking Anderson if the drugs being given to Bonds were the same “that Marion Jones and them were using.”
“Yeah, same stuff, the same stuff that worked at the Olympics,” Anderson is quoted as saying.
And, Anderson added for emphasis, Olympians were tested every week. “So that’s why I know it works,” Anderson is quoted as saying. (Jones, an Olympic gold-medal winner, pleaded guilty in 2007 to making false statements about her use of performance-enhancing drugs and received a six-month prison sentence.)
Although the results of the three urine samples that Balco tested in 2000 and 2001 do not have Bonds’s name on them, prosecutors say they can be connected to handwritten notes seized at Balco and Anderson’s home in 2003. Those notes display the names of Bonds and other individuals and numbers that, prosecutors say, correlate to samples that Balco sent for drug testing. Prosecutors contend that the three tests show Bonds tested positive for two steroids — methenolone and nandrolone — in November 2000 and February 2001.
But in their 28-page motion to exclude evidence, Bonds’s lawyers said: “It appears that as to every proffered test result, the government can attempt to link Mr. Bonds to the sample in question only through purported hearsay statement of Anderson.”
In all, five pages of handwritten notes are attributed to Anderson, and in disputing them, the defense states: “The notes are barely comprehensible. Their author(s) are unknown as are the time and purpose of their preparation.”
The defense lawyers said the notes were indicative “of the government’s zeal to convict Mr. Bonds by any means at all.” They also said the doping calendars, which the prosecutors say Anderson created so he could monitor Bonds’s use of drugs, should not be admissible, either.
The fourth positive steroid test cited in the documents does not involve Anderson or his notes. Instead, it stems from the anonymous drug tests that were conducted by Major League Baseball in 2003, the first year of steroid testing on the major league level. There were no penalties for positive results, and not even the players were supposed to know how their tests came out.
Bonds’s urine sample did not produce a positive test under baseball’s guidelines. But in a raid in 2004, authorities seized the samples and test results of Bonds and the nine other players who had testified before the Balco grand jury. Two years later, the U.C.L.A. laboratory that retested Bonds’s sample concluded that it contained the designer steroid THG, known as “the clear”; clomid, an anti-estrogen drug used to stimulate natural testosterone levels; and the presence of testosterone not naturally made by the body.
Baseball did not test for THG in 2003 and did not begin testing for clomid until the 2007 season. Why Bonds did not test positive for testosterone in 2003 is not clear.
When Bonds testified before the Balco grand jury in 2003, he said that he had used the “clear” and the “cream,” a lotion with epitestosterone and testosterone, but did not believe they were performance-enhancing drugs. He said he believed the “clear” was flaxseed oil and that the “cream” was a balm for arthritis. He said he used the “cream” sparingly.
The New York Times reported last week that federal authorities had detected a steroid other than the “clear” and the “cream” in a urine sample from Bonds. The documents unsealed Wednesday said that testosterone had been detected in Bonds’s 2003 sample, but did not say whether the source was the “cream” or another anabolic steroid.
“You cannot tell from a urine analysis whether a person has used the cream or has been using other sources of testosterone, like gels, patches or injectables,” said Dr. Gary I. Wadler, an antidoping expert and member of the World Anti-Doping Agency.
The documents also included a 2006 letter from Commissioner Bud Selig to Bonds notifying him of a first-time positive test for amphetamines, which does not result in a suspension. The test result does not appear to be directly related to the perjury case.
Alex Rodriguez tested positive for steroids in 2003
http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2009/baseball/mlb/02/07/alex-rodriguez-steroids/index.htmlSources tell SI Alex Rodriguez tested positive for steroids in 2003
Story Highlights
Rodriguez tested positive for Primobolan and testosterone while with the Rangers
Under the 2003 survey testing, there were no penalties for a positive test
Rodriguez was one of 104 players who tested positive that year
Saturday February 7, 2009
By Selena Roberts and David Epstein
In 2003, when he won the American League home run title and the AL Most Valuable Player award as a shortstop for the Texas Rangers, Alex Rodriguez tested positive for two anabolic steroids, four sources have independently told Sports Illustrated.
Rodriguez's name appears on a list of 104 players who tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs in Major League Baseball's '03 survey testing, SI's sources say. As part of a joint agreement with the MLB Players Association, the testing was conducted to determine if it was necessary to impose mandatory random drug testing across the major leagues in 2004.
When approached by an SI reporter on Thursday at a gym in Miami, Rodriguez declined to discuss his 2003 test results. "You'll have to talk to the union," said Rodriguez, the Yankees' third baseman since his trade to New York in February 2004. When asked if there was an explanation for his positive test, he said, "I'm not saying anything."
The MLBPA issued a statement on Saturday, saying "Information and documents relating to the results of the 2003 MLB testing program are both confidential and under seal by court orders. We are prohibited from confirming or denying any allegation about the test results of any particular player[s] by the collective bargaining agreement and by court orders. Anyone with knowledge of such documents who discloses their contents may be in violation of those court orders."
Rob Manfred, MLB's Executive Vice President of Labor Relations, also released a statement on Saturday, saying, "We are disturbed by the allegations contained in the Sports Illustrated news story which was posted online this morning. Because the survey testing that took place in 2003 was intended to be non-disciplinary and anonymous, we can not make any comment on the accuracy of this report as it pertains to the player named."
Though MLB's drug policy has expressly prohibited the use of steroids without a valid prescription since 1991, there were no penalties for a positive test in 2003. The results of that year's survey testing of 1,198 players were meant to be anonymous under the agreement between the commissioner's office and the players association. Rodriguez's testing information was found, however, after federal agents, armed with search warrants, seized the '03 test results from Comprehensive Drug Testing, Inc., of Long Beach, Calif., one of two labs used by MLB in connection with that year's survey testing. The seizure took place in April 2004 as part of the government's investigation into 10 major league players linked to the BALCO scandal -- though Rodriguez himself has never been connected to BALCO.
The list of the 104 players whose urine samples tested positive is under seal in California. However, two sources familiar with the evidence that the government has gathered in its investigation of steroid use in baseball and two other sources with knowledge of the testing results have told Sports Illustrated that Rodriguez is one of the 104 players identified as having tested positive, in his case for testosterone and an anabolic steroid known by the brand name Primobolan. All four sources spoke on the condition of anonymity due to the sensitive nature of the evidence.
Primobolan, which is also known by the chemical name methenolone, is an injected or orally administered drug that is more expensive than most steroids. (A 12-week cycle can cost $500.) It improves strength and maintains lean muscle with minimal bulk development, according to steroid experts, and has relatively few side effects. Kirk Radomski, the former New York Mets clubhouse employee who in 2007 pleaded guilty to illegal distribution of steroids to numerous major league players, described in his recent book, Bases Loaded: The Inside Story of the Steroid Era in Baseballby the Central Figure in the Mitchell Report, how players increasingly turned to drugs such as Primobolan in 2003, in part to avoid detection in testing. Primobolan is detectable for a shorter period of time than the steroid previously favored by players, Deca-Durabolin. According to a search of FDA records, Primobolan is not an approved prescription drug in the United States, nor was it in 2003. (Testosterone can be taken legally with an appropriate medical prescription.)
Rodriguez finished the 2003 season by winning his third straight league home run title (with 47) and the first of his three MVP awards.
Because more than 5% of big leaguers had tested positive in 2003, baseball instituted a mandatory random-testing program, with penalties, in '04. According to the 2007 Mitchell Report on steroid use in baseball, in September 2004, Gene Orza, the chief operating officer of the players' union, violated an agreement with MLB by tipping off a player (not named in the report) about an upcoming, supposedly unannounced drug test. Three major league players who spoke to SI said that Rodriguez was also tipped by Orza in early September 2004 that he would be tested later that month. Rodriguez declined to respond on Thursday when asked about the warning Orza provided him.
When Orza was asked on Friday in the union's New York City office about the tipping allegations, he told a reporter, "I'm not interested in discussing this information with you."
In its statement on Saturday, the MLBPA said, "As we have explained previously, in detail and in public, there was no improper tipping of players in 2004 about the timing of drug tests. As set forth in our letter to Chairman Waxman of the House Government Reform Committee, in September 2004 MLBPA attorneys met with certain players, but we are not able to confirm or deny the names of any of the players with whom we met."
Anticipating that the 33-year-old Rodriguez, who has 553 career home runs, could become the game's alltime home run king, the Yankees signed him in November 2007 to a 10-year, incentive-laden deal that could be worth as much as $305 million. Rodriguez is reportedly guaranteed $275 million and could receive a $6 million bonus each time he ties one of the four players at the top of the list: Willie Mays (660), Babe Ruth (714), Hank Aaron (755) and Barry Bonds (762), and an additional $6 million for passing Bonds. In order to receive the incentive money, the contract reportedly requires Rodriguez to make extra promotional appearances and sign memorabilia for the Yankees as part of a marketing plan surrounding his pursuit of Bonds's record. Two sources familiar with Rodriguez's contract told SI that there is no language about steroids in the contract that would put Rodriguez at risk of losing money.
Arguments before an 11-judge panel in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in Pasadena are ongoing between government prosecutors and the players' association over the government's seizure of the test results from the Long Beach lab. The agents who collected the material had a search warrant only for the results for the 10 BALCO-linked players. Attorneys from the union argue that the government is entitled only to the results for those players, not the entire list. If the court sides with the union, federal authorities may be barred from using the positive survey test results of non-BALCO players such as Rodriguez in their ongoing investigations.
Thursday, February 28, 2008
Is It Time for Clemens to Dial Nanny 911?
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/26/sports/baseball/26araton.html
February 26, 2008
Sports of The Times
Is It Time for Clemens to Dial Nanny 911?
By HARVEY ARATON
The nanny, it turns out, speaks English and speaks it well, idioms and all.
A reading of an online transcript and a telephone call to the press office of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform revealed that Roger Clemens, aided by political muscle, distorted the linguistic skills of a former employee and grandmother of two.
“And her English, as I understand it, is not that good,” Tom Davis, the Virginia Republican and ranking minority committee member, cued Clemens at the Capitol Hill hearing earlier this month.
“It is not that good,” Clemens replied, seizing the opportunity to make the masses understand why the nanny had to be summoned to his Houston Ponderosa before her interview with committee investigators — for her own good, of course.
But Steven G. Glickman, counsel to the majority and a participant in the telephone interview, indicated through a committee press officer that the unnamed nanny spoke English that was only accented, not deficient.
For instance, when told she had the right to representation, the nanny replied she didn’t have a lawyer before adding: “But I’m not afraid, I’m telling the truth, so bring it on.”
Make her day.
Sounds like an opening line scripted by Clint Eastwood, or Clemens, the cold-blooded gunslinger from 60 feet 6 inches away, but now closer than ever to staring down at Jeff Novitzky, the I.R.S. special agent and sultan of steroid-enforcement swat.
Monday came the news that a draft letter was drawn up last week by committee staff members for the purposes of referring the Clemens case to the Justice Department. Get those scorecards ready. The real game, not the exhibition spitting contest the Clemens and Brian McNamee camps have waged all winter, may be about to begin.
You wonder: Is Clemens finally seeing the big picture, fearing that a hastily stitched tapestry of tall tales dating to 1998 is about to unravel?
It should by now be fairly well established that he was at José Canseco’s place in South Florida when they visited with the Blue Jays that year in June to drop off his family, or to take a tour of the property or a performance-enhancement tutorial.
We also know that Canseco has said Clemens was not at the party, while the nanny said that Clemens was at the house but she did not recall a party, while a photograph that reportedly has surfaced places Clemens at the possible party, while Clemens has a golf receipt to prove that while he might have stopped by, he wasn’t there long enough to party or be party to any discussion of drugs.
•
Questioned about the dizzying timeline of Clemens’s appearance and exit, the nanny — again, not as verbally challenged as Davis understood her to be and Clemens agreed she was — cut to the heart of the matter, as it relates to the possibility of meaningful disclosure.
“Well, first of all, that’s kind of hard to tell because I wasn’t with him 24/7,” she said, speaking to the absurdity of the ongoing party dissection, 10 years after. With the exception of the Republican cheerleaders who allowed Clemens and his lawyers to set this smoke screen during the hearing, who actually believed it was ever germane to the McNamee claims of injecting Clemens with steroids and human growth hormone?
Surely not Henry A. Waxman, the California Democrat and committee chairman, who made himself clear after the hearing that he did not think much of what Clemens had to say. Common sense tells us that Waxman is driving the bus and ready to hand Clemens, if not McNamee, off to Novitzky and the Balco bashers that brought down Marion Jones and brought perjury and obstruction of justice charges against Barry Bonds.
Obviously, an investigation by the Justice Department does not guarantee an eventual indictment on perjury charges, Ã la Jones and Bonds. It does mean that Clemens’s public relations campaign against McNamee and anyone whose version of events contrasted his own has failed. In the court of public opinion, and to the committee members who did not want his autograph, the more Clemens went on the attack, the less believable he was.
When he publicly aired a secretly taped telephone conversation with McNamee, his former trainer sounded distraught over having to give him up to George Mitchell, not like some deluded soul bent on destroying an all-time great. When Clemens was confronted with the damaging testimony of Andy and Laura Pettitte, his attempts to question his protégé’s comprehension skills made you wonder if Clemens comprehended the gravity of his denials, under oath.
•
Everyone’s reputation was deemed sacrificial to save his own. His agents took hits for his troubles. His wife, Debbie, was exposed as an H.G.H. user. The nanny, whose interview included an eloquent expression of affection seven years after she left Clemens’s employ, was made to sound like someone who had just slipped into the country in the back of a truck.
Bring it on, Clemens kept saying, while everyone around him took a hit. Now there is a draft letter that probably leads to a criminal investigation. No turning back now. No promise of relief up ahead. For his last act in baseball, he may have to go the distance.
E-mail: hjaraton@nytimes.com
February 26, 2008
Sports of The Times
Is It Time for Clemens to Dial Nanny 911?
By HARVEY ARATON
The nanny, it turns out, speaks English and speaks it well, idioms and all.
A reading of an online transcript and a telephone call to the press office of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform revealed that Roger Clemens, aided by political muscle, distorted the linguistic skills of a former employee and grandmother of two.
“And her English, as I understand it, is not that good,” Tom Davis, the Virginia Republican and ranking minority committee member, cued Clemens at the Capitol Hill hearing earlier this month.
“It is not that good,” Clemens replied, seizing the opportunity to make the masses understand why the nanny had to be summoned to his Houston Ponderosa before her interview with committee investigators — for her own good, of course.
But Steven G. Glickman, counsel to the majority and a participant in the telephone interview, indicated through a committee press officer that the unnamed nanny spoke English that was only accented, not deficient.
For instance, when told she had the right to representation, the nanny replied she didn’t have a lawyer before adding: “But I’m not afraid, I’m telling the truth, so bring it on.”
Make her day.
Sounds like an opening line scripted by Clint Eastwood, or Clemens, the cold-blooded gunslinger from 60 feet 6 inches away, but now closer than ever to staring down at Jeff Novitzky, the I.R.S. special agent and sultan of steroid-enforcement swat.
Monday came the news that a draft letter was drawn up last week by committee staff members for the purposes of referring the Clemens case to the Justice Department. Get those scorecards ready. The real game, not the exhibition spitting contest the Clemens and Brian McNamee camps have waged all winter, may be about to begin.
You wonder: Is Clemens finally seeing the big picture, fearing that a hastily stitched tapestry of tall tales dating to 1998 is about to unravel?
It should by now be fairly well established that he was at José Canseco’s place in South Florida when they visited with the Blue Jays that year in June to drop off his family, or to take a tour of the property or a performance-enhancement tutorial.
We also know that Canseco has said Clemens was not at the party, while the nanny said that Clemens was at the house but she did not recall a party, while a photograph that reportedly has surfaced places Clemens at the possible party, while Clemens has a golf receipt to prove that while he might have stopped by, he wasn’t there long enough to party or be party to any discussion of drugs.
•
Questioned about the dizzying timeline of Clemens’s appearance and exit, the nanny — again, not as verbally challenged as Davis understood her to be and Clemens agreed she was — cut to the heart of the matter, as it relates to the possibility of meaningful disclosure.
“Well, first of all, that’s kind of hard to tell because I wasn’t with him 24/7,” she said, speaking to the absurdity of the ongoing party dissection, 10 years after. With the exception of the Republican cheerleaders who allowed Clemens and his lawyers to set this smoke screen during the hearing, who actually believed it was ever germane to the McNamee claims of injecting Clemens with steroids and human growth hormone?
Surely not Henry A. Waxman, the California Democrat and committee chairman, who made himself clear after the hearing that he did not think much of what Clemens had to say. Common sense tells us that Waxman is driving the bus and ready to hand Clemens, if not McNamee, off to Novitzky and the Balco bashers that brought down Marion Jones and brought perjury and obstruction of justice charges against Barry Bonds.
Obviously, an investigation by the Justice Department does not guarantee an eventual indictment on perjury charges, Ã la Jones and Bonds. It does mean that Clemens’s public relations campaign against McNamee and anyone whose version of events contrasted his own has failed. In the court of public opinion, and to the committee members who did not want his autograph, the more Clemens went on the attack, the less believable he was.
When he publicly aired a secretly taped telephone conversation with McNamee, his former trainer sounded distraught over having to give him up to George Mitchell, not like some deluded soul bent on destroying an all-time great. When Clemens was confronted with the damaging testimony of Andy and Laura Pettitte, his attempts to question his protégé’s comprehension skills made you wonder if Clemens comprehended the gravity of his denials, under oath.
•
Everyone’s reputation was deemed sacrificial to save his own. His agents took hits for his troubles. His wife, Debbie, was exposed as an H.G.H. user. The nanny, whose interview included an eloquent expression of affection seven years after she left Clemens’s employ, was made to sound like someone who had just slipped into the country in the back of a truck.
Bring it on, Clemens kept saying, while everyone around him took a hit. Now there is a draft letter that probably leads to a criminal investigation. No turning back now. No promise of relief up ahead. For his last act in baseball, he may have to go the distance.
E-mail: hjaraton@nytimes.com
Friday, February 15, 2008
Trainer provides physical evidence against Clemens
http://www.latimes.com/sports/printedition/la-sp-clemens7feb07,0,7944007.story
Trainer reportedly provides physical evidence against Clemens
Brian McNamee is said to have given federal investigators items that he kept from earlier seasons that could link the pitcher to drug use. Clemens' lawyer accuses the trainer of deception.
By Lance Pugmire and Bill Shaikin, Los Angeles Times Staff Writers
February 7, 2008
Roger Clemens' former trainer has given physical evidence to federal investigators that will confirm the pitcher used performance-enhancing drugs, the trainer's attorneys said Wednesday.
The evidence includes vials with traces of steroids and human growth hormone, blood-stained syringes and gauze pads that may contain the seven-time Cy Young Award winner's DNA, the New York Daily News reported on its website, citing an anonymous source.
The evidence has been sent to a lab for testing of drugs and blood, the Daily News reported. Depending on the results, prosecutors could seek a DNA sample from Clemens.
"If Roger Clemens' DNA is on that used needle, that's the functional equivalent of the little blue dress in the Monica Lewinsky case that forced Bill Clinton to admit his affair," former federal prosecutor Brian Lysaght said.
Lanny Breuer, an attorney for Clemens, accused trainer Brian McNamee of smearing Clemens and attacked his credibility.
"Brian McNamee is obviously a troubled man who is obsessed with doing everything possible to destroy Roger Clemens," Breuer said in a statement, adding that McNamee had lied to baseball and government investigators and "now he apparently has manufactured evidence."
"He now claims he kept blood, gauze and needles from Roger Clemens for seven years," Breuer said. "It defies all sensibility. It is just not credible -- who in their right mind does such a thing?
"As Roger has said under oath to Congress and to the American public, at no time did he take steroids or growth hormone. Despite the desperate smears of Brian McNamee, Roger is looking forward to testifying before Congress next week to set the record straight."
The disclosure is the latest dramatic development in the steroid allegations involving Clemens, which surfaced in December with the release of former Sen. George Mitchell's report examining the use of performance-enhancing substances in Major League Baseball.
McNamee told Mitchell's investigators that he injected Clemens, a seven-time Cy Young Award winner, with steroids or HGH on 16 occasions in 1998, 2000 and 2001. Until now, it was not known if there was any physical evidence that might back up McNamee's allegations. Clemens has said the only injections he received from McNamee were for vitamin B-12 and the pain reliever lidocaine.
The Daily News report said McNamee kept the evidence from the 2000 and 2001 seasons out of fear Clemens would deny use of the drugs if the issue were ever investigated.
The onetime strength and conditioning coach of the Toronto Blue Jays and New York Yankees preserved the evidence because as "a former police officer," he knew it was important to do so, Richard Emery, an attorney for McNamee, told The Times.
Emery declined to describe the evidence but said it was delivered to U.S. Justice Department investigators from San Francisco "some time ago."
McNamee and Clemens will be on Capitol Hill today. As McNamee gives his deposition, Clemens will meet several of the lawmakers scheduled to question him under oath next week -- meetings Breuer said had been in the works before Wednesday's disclosure.
Clemens was deposed Tuesday by attorneys with the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. He said he denied under oath having taken steroids or HGH, as McNamee has alleged.
Ronald J. Nessim, a former federal prosecutor in Los Angeles, said Clemens is in "high jeopardy" of a criminal case if he's lying.
"It's true his reputation is in tatters, with his Hall of Fame chances being questioned and all that, but nothing he's done is criminal unless he's lying," Nessim said. "It's very brazen if he's doing it in Congress. Prosecutors and members of Congress don't like that.
" . . . Even if it's a one-on-one credibility contest, physical evidence at some point can become sufficient to prosecute. If it's powerful evidence, he's vulnerable."
Breuer said the disclosure deprived Clemens of the opportunity to refute the claim to government investigators.
"It's a complete stunt," the attorney said, "calculated to do only one thing, and that is to destroy a good man's name. Sadly, it works."
A spokesman for the U.S. attorney's office in San Francisco, which is supervising the investigation of performance-enhancing drug use in sports that started with the 2003 raid of the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative (BALCO), said his office had no comment on the Daily News' report.
Emery said McNamee will discuss his turnover of the evidence at a news conference after today's deposition.
The one-on-one meetings Clemens will hold today were offered by his representatives to selected committee members in advance of next week's televised hearing. The so-called "courtesy calls" enable legislators to talk to witnesses without the five-minute limit on questioning that applies in a hearing, and outside that potentially adversarial setting.
"Roger has nothing to hide," Breuer said. "He feels the best way to show that is to meet with members and let them know he never took steroids or HGH."
Breuer said he did not know which members had accepted invitations to meet with Clemens.
lance.pugmire@latimes.com
bill.shaikin@latimes.com
Trainer reportedly provides physical evidence against Clemens
Brian McNamee is said to have given federal investigators items that he kept from earlier seasons that could link the pitcher to drug use. Clemens' lawyer accuses the trainer of deception.
By Lance Pugmire and Bill Shaikin, Los Angeles Times Staff Writers
February 7, 2008
Roger Clemens' former trainer has given physical evidence to federal investigators that will confirm the pitcher used performance-enhancing drugs, the trainer's attorneys said Wednesday.
The evidence includes vials with traces of steroids and human growth hormone, blood-stained syringes and gauze pads that may contain the seven-time Cy Young Award winner's DNA, the New York Daily News reported on its website, citing an anonymous source.
The evidence has been sent to a lab for testing of drugs and blood, the Daily News reported. Depending on the results, prosecutors could seek a DNA sample from Clemens.
"If Roger Clemens' DNA is on that used needle, that's the functional equivalent of the little blue dress in the Monica Lewinsky case that forced Bill Clinton to admit his affair," former federal prosecutor Brian Lysaght said.
Lanny Breuer, an attorney for Clemens, accused trainer Brian McNamee of smearing Clemens and attacked his credibility.
"Brian McNamee is obviously a troubled man who is obsessed with doing everything possible to destroy Roger Clemens," Breuer said in a statement, adding that McNamee had lied to baseball and government investigators and "now he apparently has manufactured evidence."
"He now claims he kept blood, gauze and needles from Roger Clemens for seven years," Breuer said. "It defies all sensibility. It is just not credible -- who in their right mind does such a thing?
"As Roger has said under oath to Congress and to the American public, at no time did he take steroids or growth hormone. Despite the desperate smears of Brian McNamee, Roger is looking forward to testifying before Congress next week to set the record straight."
The disclosure is the latest dramatic development in the steroid allegations involving Clemens, which surfaced in December with the release of former Sen. George Mitchell's report examining the use of performance-enhancing substances in Major League Baseball.
McNamee told Mitchell's investigators that he injected Clemens, a seven-time Cy Young Award winner, with steroids or HGH on 16 occasions in 1998, 2000 and 2001. Until now, it was not known if there was any physical evidence that might back up McNamee's allegations. Clemens has said the only injections he received from McNamee were for vitamin B-12 and the pain reliever lidocaine.
The Daily News report said McNamee kept the evidence from the 2000 and 2001 seasons out of fear Clemens would deny use of the drugs if the issue were ever investigated.
The onetime strength and conditioning coach of the Toronto Blue Jays and New York Yankees preserved the evidence because as "a former police officer," he knew it was important to do so, Richard Emery, an attorney for McNamee, told The Times.
Emery declined to describe the evidence but said it was delivered to U.S. Justice Department investigators from San Francisco "some time ago."
McNamee and Clemens will be on Capitol Hill today. As McNamee gives his deposition, Clemens will meet several of the lawmakers scheduled to question him under oath next week -- meetings Breuer said had been in the works before Wednesday's disclosure.
Clemens was deposed Tuesday by attorneys with the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. He said he denied under oath having taken steroids or HGH, as McNamee has alleged.
Ronald J. Nessim, a former federal prosecutor in Los Angeles, said Clemens is in "high jeopardy" of a criminal case if he's lying.
"It's true his reputation is in tatters, with his Hall of Fame chances being questioned and all that, but nothing he's done is criminal unless he's lying," Nessim said. "It's very brazen if he's doing it in Congress. Prosecutors and members of Congress don't like that.
" . . . Even if it's a one-on-one credibility contest, physical evidence at some point can become sufficient to prosecute. If it's powerful evidence, he's vulnerable."
Breuer said the disclosure deprived Clemens of the opportunity to refute the claim to government investigators.
"It's a complete stunt," the attorney said, "calculated to do only one thing, and that is to destroy a good man's name. Sadly, it works."
A spokesman for the U.S. attorney's office in San Francisco, which is supervising the investigation of performance-enhancing drug use in sports that started with the 2003 raid of the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative (BALCO), said his office had no comment on the Daily News' report.
Emery said McNamee will discuss his turnover of the evidence at a news conference after today's deposition.
The one-on-one meetings Clemens will hold today were offered by his representatives to selected committee members in advance of next week's televised hearing. The so-called "courtesy calls" enable legislators to talk to witnesses without the five-minute limit on questioning that applies in a hearing, and outside that potentially adversarial setting.
"Roger has nothing to hide," Breuer said. "He feels the best way to show that is to meet with members and let them know he never took steroids or HGH."
Breuer said he did not know which members had accepted invitations to meet with Clemens.
lance.pugmire@latimes.com
bill.shaikin@latimes.com
Saturday, November 17, 2007
Hammer falls on Bonds
http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2007/writers/tom_verducci/11/15/bonds.indictment/
Hammer falls on Bonds
Major League Baseball knew this day was coming
Posted: Friday November 16, 2007
Barry Bonds is set to appear in U.S. District Court in San Francisco on Dec. 7.
Heinz Kluetmeier/SI
The number 762, which today looks very much like the final number, is an asterisk unto itself.
Barry Bonds hit what may very well be the final home run of his career on Sept. 5 against Ubaldo Jimenez, a young man who was born just two years before Bonds hit his first home run. Seven-hundred-sixty-two has the authenticy of a curbside Rolex, the honor of Ben Johnson's 9.79. There is nothing commissioner Bud Selig needs to do. Doubt and disgrace are lined up to be its perpetual companions.
The number 732 is what counts. Officially, the case number is 3:07-CR-00732-WHA, the United States of America vs. Barry Lamar Bonds. You tell me the team that would dare sign a 43-year-old designated hitter who is under indictment by the federal government, which officially has called him out as a liar and a cheat of criminal proportions. Given Bonds' instinct to resist, and given the delusional world in which he has created for himself, you would expect he is prepared for a lengthy and costly legal fight, a fight that would seem to subsume whatever playing days he might have had left. It could be years before he goes all Marion Jones on us, like Pete Rose gone clean, if the day ever does come at all.
Think about it: the all-time home run leader is forced into exile by a federal felony indictment. Doesn't exactly have the ring of a Mastercard commercial with tinkling piano music, now does it? And you can bet nobody in the Major League Baseball offices is too broken up over it. They will root hard for Alex Rodriguez to get to 763 quickly.
On days like this I go back to what Gary Sheffield once told me he told Bonds the one winter they shared a house, workouts and, apparently, some wonder cream. "Barry," Sheffield said he told Bonds one particular day when he was fed up with Bonds' attitude, "you treat people like [garbage] enough, it's going to come back to haunt you. People will look for reasons to get you."
Understand this: the BALCO investigation began as a dumpster-diving crackdown into steroid distribution. Bonds was not a target, only a client. And if he wasn't its most famous client, he was its most arrogant and defiant. He did everything but wag a Palmeiro finger in the face of the feds, daring them to come after him. This went on for four years. So here are the feds, loaded with these doping calendars and, as we read in the indictment 732 now, at least one positive drug test, and they've already built cases against Jones and the track coach Trevor Graham, and they're supposed to let the biggest, most defiant fish off the hook? Not happening. It's human nature. It may explain the curious timing of the HGH leaks out of Florida: Rick Ankiel just when he is baseball's Cinderella, Scott Schoenweis while he is in a wild pennant race, Paul Byrd when he is in the ALCS, Jose Guillen when a decision on his option year is in play ...
It turns out that Bonds was going to get indicted all along. Greg Anderson, his trainer, never did flip, at least according to his attorney. The supporting information in the indictment is almost entirely from information the United States attorney's office has held for years. Here are the details of the four perjury charges:
• Count 1: That Bonds gave false testimony when he said Anderson did not provide him with steroids in 2000 and 2001.
• Count 2: That Bonds was not truthful when asked if Anderson or anyone else had ever injected him with drugs.
• Count 3: That Bonds was not truthful when he said Anderson never gave him growth hormone.
• Count 4: That Bonds was not truthful when he said he did not receive the cream and the clear (or what Bonds thought to be flaxseed oil) until prior to the 2003 season.
To make these charges, the feds must have strong evidence that specifically rebuts Bonds' statements. For instance, federal agents, according to grand jury proceedings, possess doping calendars that indicate that Bonds tested positive for two anabolic steroids in November of 2000. (BALCO would routinely send out clients' blood to be tested.) So what took so long if Anderson didn't provide the tipping point? Maybe it wasn't too long. This is a federal felony indictment we're talking about. The same people who are crying "what took so long" are the same ones who would have been crying "rush to judgment" if the indictment came down in 2004. The feds don't bring an indictment unless they are rock-solid sure they have a winnable case. There is no reason to rush. Besides, the presiding U.S. attorney and the attorney general both were replaced during the investigation.
But you do have to wonder how much of this was done with MLB people inside the loop. Was it coincidence that Bonds gets indicted five days after former Sen. George Mitchell closed the door on receiving evidence and conducting interviews for his steroid investigation?
You can listen all you want to people claiming this to be a "sad day for baseball," but it's a day baseball knew was coming. On the morning of Bonds' indictment, Selig announced that baseball topped $6 billion in revenues for the first time, allowing it to claim it has topped the NFL as the biggest cash cow in North American sports. Taking Bonds out of the equation, the way the suits at MLB see it, is not a bad thing for business.
So maybe this is how it ends for Bonds, like so many mobsters and white-collar criminals, with the coverup instead of the crime bringing about the downfall. Of course, this is an indictment, not a conviction. He will get a chance to clear his name, to fight the charges, and we should let the process play out. But to be playing major league baseball next spring, Bonds needs the government to have a weak case after four years of preparation, to be flat wrong about these doping calendars and drug tests. He needs his name cleared quickly at trial and with certainty. And after that he still needs a team to believe that he is worth the baggage, right or wrong, of being the face of The Steroid Era, an era baseball so clumsily is trying to bury, like nuclear waste rods in the desert. The odds of all that falling into place for Bonds are enormous, much greater than one in 732.
Hammer falls on Bonds
Major League Baseball knew this day was coming
Posted: Friday November 16, 2007
Barry Bonds is set to appear in U.S. District Court in San Francisco on Dec. 7.
Heinz Kluetmeier/SI
The number 762, which today looks very much like the final number, is an asterisk unto itself.
Barry Bonds hit what may very well be the final home run of his career on Sept. 5 against Ubaldo Jimenez, a young man who was born just two years before Bonds hit his first home run. Seven-hundred-sixty-two has the authenticy of a curbside Rolex, the honor of Ben Johnson's 9.79. There is nothing commissioner Bud Selig needs to do. Doubt and disgrace are lined up to be its perpetual companions.
The number 732 is what counts. Officially, the case number is 3:07-CR-00732-WHA, the United States of America vs. Barry Lamar Bonds. You tell me the team that would dare sign a 43-year-old designated hitter who is under indictment by the federal government, which officially has called him out as a liar and a cheat of criminal proportions. Given Bonds' instinct to resist, and given the delusional world in which he has created for himself, you would expect he is prepared for a lengthy and costly legal fight, a fight that would seem to subsume whatever playing days he might have had left. It could be years before he goes all Marion Jones on us, like Pete Rose gone clean, if the day ever does come at all.
Think about it: the all-time home run leader is forced into exile by a federal felony indictment. Doesn't exactly have the ring of a Mastercard commercial with tinkling piano music, now does it? And you can bet nobody in the Major League Baseball offices is too broken up over it. They will root hard for Alex Rodriguez to get to 763 quickly.
On days like this I go back to what Gary Sheffield once told me he told Bonds the one winter they shared a house, workouts and, apparently, some wonder cream. "Barry," Sheffield said he told Bonds one particular day when he was fed up with Bonds' attitude, "you treat people like [garbage] enough, it's going to come back to haunt you. People will look for reasons to get you."
Understand this: the BALCO investigation began as a dumpster-diving crackdown into steroid distribution. Bonds was not a target, only a client. And if he wasn't its most famous client, he was its most arrogant and defiant. He did everything but wag a Palmeiro finger in the face of the feds, daring them to come after him. This went on for four years. So here are the feds, loaded with these doping calendars and, as we read in the indictment 732 now, at least one positive drug test, and they've already built cases against Jones and the track coach Trevor Graham, and they're supposed to let the biggest, most defiant fish off the hook? Not happening. It's human nature. It may explain the curious timing of the HGH leaks out of Florida: Rick Ankiel just when he is baseball's Cinderella, Scott Schoenweis while he is in a wild pennant race, Paul Byrd when he is in the ALCS, Jose Guillen when a decision on his option year is in play ...
It turns out that Bonds was going to get indicted all along. Greg Anderson, his trainer, never did flip, at least according to his attorney. The supporting information in the indictment is almost entirely from information the United States attorney's office has held for years. Here are the details of the four perjury charges:
• Count 1: That Bonds gave false testimony when he said Anderson did not provide him with steroids in 2000 and 2001.
• Count 2: That Bonds was not truthful when asked if Anderson or anyone else had ever injected him with drugs.
• Count 3: That Bonds was not truthful when he said Anderson never gave him growth hormone.
• Count 4: That Bonds was not truthful when he said he did not receive the cream and the clear (or what Bonds thought to be flaxseed oil) until prior to the 2003 season.
To make these charges, the feds must have strong evidence that specifically rebuts Bonds' statements. For instance, federal agents, according to grand jury proceedings, possess doping calendars that indicate that Bonds tested positive for two anabolic steroids in November of 2000. (BALCO would routinely send out clients' blood to be tested.) So what took so long if Anderson didn't provide the tipping point? Maybe it wasn't too long. This is a federal felony indictment we're talking about. The same people who are crying "what took so long" are the same ones who would have been crying "rush to judgment" if the indictment came down in 2004. The feds don't bring an indictment unless they are rock-solid sure they have a winnable case. There is no reason to rush. Besides, the presiding U.S. attorney and the attorney general both were replaced during the investigation.
But you do have to wonder how much of this was done with MLB people inside the loop. Was it coincidence that Bonds gets indicted five days after former Sen. George Mitchell closed the door on receiving evidence and conducting interviews for his steroid investigation?
You can listen all you want to people claiming this to be a "sad day for baseball," but it's a day baseball knew was coming. On the morning of Bonds' indictment, Selig announced that baseball topped $6 billion in revenues for the first time, allowing it to claim it has topped the NFL as the biggest cash cow in North American sports. Taking Bonds out of the equation, the way the suits at MLB see it, is not a bad thing for business.
So maybe this is how it ends for Bonds, like so many mobsters and white-collar criminals, with the coverup instead of the crime bringing about the downfall. Of course, this is an indictment, not a conviction. He will get a chance to clear his name, to fight the charges, and we should let the process play out. But to be playing major league baseball next spring, Bonds needs the government to have a weak case after four years of preparation, to be flat wrong about these doping calendars and drug tests. He needs his name cleared quickly at trial and with certainty. And after that he still needs a team to believe that he is worth the baggage, right or wrong, of being the face of The Steroid Era, an era baseball so clumsily is trying to bury, like nuclear waste rods in the desert. The odds of all that falling into place for Bonds are enormous, much greater than one in 732.
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