Tangled Webs (55 page)
Authors: James B. Stewart
Tags: #History, #United States, #General, #Law, #Ethics & Professional Responsibility
When portraying himself as a whistle-blower, an advocate for playing by the rules, Graham was expansive.
The notion that Graham was a law-abiding idealist who wouldn’t tolerate the use of illegal performance-enhancing drugs by his athletes permeated the interview, perhaps because his wife was sitting nearby. Graham worried openly that cooperating with the authorities, which he’d done by turning in the syringe, would lead to retaliation. “Graham is concerned for his family,” Novitzky wrote, and that “Hunter and Conte were going to harm him physically.”
According to Novitzky’s notes of the meeting, “Trevor Graham stated that as a coach he felt that he has always ‘done the right thing.’ ” Players he suspected of using illegal drugs he kicked out of his training camp. As for his most famous clients, he said he “never physically observed Tim Montgomery taking drugs,” that he “never saw or heard of Marion Jones taking any illegal performance-enhancing drugs,” and “brought nothing with him to Sydney for Marion Jones. . . . The only thing Graham ever gave Marion Jones was Gatorade, protein, and potassium for cramps.”
Graham described a visit he made to BALCO headquarters in November 2000, at Montgomery’s behest, to meet Conte, who was working closely with Montgomery on what they called Project World Record. While he was there, Graham maintained, “there was no talk of performance-enhancing drugs in his presence during his entire time at BALCO,” Novitzky wrote. “He stated that there was no talk about nutrition, clear, EPO, growth hormone, insulin, or testosterone.”
Then Novitzky got specific. He showed Graham calendars from a folder labeled “Marion Jones” that was seized in the BALCO raid. Like the others, the calendars contained codes for various illegal drugs as well as quantities and schedules. There were handwritten notes on them. Graham said he knew nothing about the calendars and had never seen them. Novitzky asked specifically if any of the handwriting on them was his, and Graham said no. Then Novitzky read from Jones’s grand jury testimony, in which she said Graham had ordered various blood tests for her. She had also identified Graham’s handwriting on the calendars.
It was an awkward moment. “Graham reiterated that he never ordered any tests for Marion and none of the handwriting on the calendars in her folder was his,” according to Novitzky’s notes.
Confronted with Federal Express receipts sent to Graham by “Vince Reed,” the pseudonym used by Conte when he was shipping illegal drugs, Graham said he hadn’t known what was in the packages and simply handed them to Jones at the track.
How did he know a package from “Vince Reed” was supposed to go to Jones? Novitzky asked.
Because “BALCO” appeared somewhere on the box, Graham answered.
But why would Conte use a pseudonym and then put “BALCO” on the package? “Graham did not have an explanation,” Novitzky noted.
Indeed, Graham didn’t have an explanation–at least, not a plausible one–for any of the documents Novitzky produced. Eventually Graham contradicted himself on some points, conceding, for example, that he was aware that Conte was testing Jones’s blood and urine samples.
Then Novitzky shifted away from Conte and BALCO. Who was “Memo”?
This should have been a warning to Graham: How could the agents know about Memo, who had nothing to do with BALCO? It isn’t clear why Graham’s lawyer failed to interrupt the interview at this juncture, but Graham plunged ahead.
“Memo” was a shot-putter from Laredo, Texas; Graham said he didn’t know his full name. Through a mutual friend, a pole-vaulter Graham knew only as “George,” Memo had contacted Graham for help getting into St. Augustine’s College, where Graham had trained. This was the extent of their relationship. According to Graham, he “never set up any of his athletes with drugs obtained from Memo,” Novitzky wrote. “Graham is not aware of any of his athletes getting drugs from Mexico. Graham has no connections with a Mexican laboratory. The only contact Graham had with Memo was over the phone, when he was trying to assist him with entry into St. Augustine’s. Graham last spoke with Memo on the phone in approximately 1997. Graham knows that Memo’s father is involved in a medical profession.”
Novitzky dutifully recorded Graham’s answers, nearly all of which had already been flatly contradicted by Tim Montgomery.
As Novitzky later described his reaction, Graham “threw a bit of a wrench into the equation in that these were not the answers based upon the evidence we were seeing and hearing that we were expecting. Any time you have another witness come forward and contradict what they told you, you have some extra work to do to figure out who is telling the truth. In regards to Marion Jones and her grand jury statements that she had never knowingly taken athletic performance-enhancing drugs, we were really thinking and hoping that Mr. Graham would be the link that would really advance that investigation. And when he told us he had no knowledge of her use, that it was not true that he was using this Memo character to set up any of his athletes with drugs, at that period of time we, obviously, had a lot more work to do in terms of the Marion Jones investigation as well.”
I
n early June 2004, the USADA formally accused Tim Montgomery and three other sprinters–but not Marion Jones–of illegal use of performance-enhancing drugs and said it would seek to prevent them from competing in the upcoming Athens Olympics. The primary basis for the charges was the documents Novitzky had gathered in the BALCO raid, as well as the memo of Conte’s interview, in which he admitted providing Montgomery with steroids. Those documents had been shared with USADA officials at the urging of Congress, and parts of some of them, including Novitzky’s memo, were quoted in both the
San Francisco Chronicle
and the
San Jose Mercury News
. Jones rushed to defend Montgomery. “I support him, and believe in him, and I have no doubt that if a fair process is applied, then Tim will be racing for gold in Athens this August.”
n early June 2004, the USADA formally accused Tim Montgomery and three other sprinters–but not Marion Jones–of illegal use of performance-enhancing drugs and said it would seek to prevent them from competing in the upcoming Athens Olympics. The primary basis for the charges was the documents Novitzky had gathered in the BALCO raid, as well as the memo of Conte’s interview, in which he admitted providing Montgomery with steroids. Those documents had been shared with USADA officials at the urging of Congress, and parts of some of them, including Novitzky’s memo, were quoted in both the
San Francisco Chronicle
and the
San Jose Mercury News
. Jones rushed to defend Montgomery. “I support him, and believe in him, and I have no doubt that if a fair process is applied, then Tim will be racing for gold in Athens this August.”
Montgomery had already admitted obtaining the drugs from Conte before the grand jury, but publicly, his lawyer, Cristina Arguedas, emphatically denied it, insisting there was “no evidence” Montgomery had used banned drugs.
By now, the
San Francisco Chronicle
had staked out a dominant role covering BALCO, both as a hometown story and as one of national significance. It had become a full-time beat for Mark Fainaru-Wada, age thirty-nine, a sports reporter who’d grown up in Marin County, and Lance Williams, fifty-three, an investigative reporter born in Ohio. Fainaru-Wada had just moved to the investigative team before the BALCO raid; at the time, he’d never heard of BALCO or Conte. Soon the sprawling story took over their lives. Fainaru-Wada says they went to bed every night “panicked” that they’d be beaten by rival reporters.
San Francisco Chronicle
had staked out a dominant role covering BALCO, both as a hometown story and as one of national significance. It had become a full-time beat for Mark Fainaru-Wada, age thirty-nine, a sports reporter who’d grown up in Marin County, and Lance Williams, fifty-three, an investigative reporter born in Ohio. Fainaru-Wada had just moved to the investigative team before the BALCO raid; at the time, he’d never heard of BALCO or Conte. Soon the sprawling story took over their lives. Fainaru-Wada says they went to bed every night “panicked” that they’d be beaten by rival reporters.
Fainaru-Wada was deeply skeptical of Montgomery’s asserted innocence. He’d been in touch with the voluble Victor Conte since being assigned to the story, and now he e-mailed Conte a copy of Arguedas’s press release and said people did not really know the whole story “because so much remains under seal.” Later that day, Fainaru-Wada sent another e-mail to Conte asking for Conte’s thoughts regarding the press release, and noting that it will “be interesting to see if and when that comes back to bite them.”
Conte responded that “Tim is dumb for trashing me like that. If his attorney does not know the scoop about his grand jury testimony, then she is not as smart as I have been told that she is by Robert Holley [Conte’s counsel]. Why set him up for a total fall when the truth comes out? And you can bet your last dollar that it will.”
That same night, in an e-mail he characterized as “off-the-record,” Conte tantalized Fainaru-Wada, writing that “I would say at this point the only way the athletes’ grand jury testimonies will come out is at trial. Unless I just give you a copy of the indexed CD-ROM that contains all thirty thousand pages of evidence. How would you like that? Just kidding.”
Soon after Montgomery’s latest declarations of innocence, someone who had a copy of the transcript allowed Fainaru-Wada to read Montgomery’s secret testimony and copy parts of it. In the
Chronicle
on June 24, Fainaru-Wada and Williams quoted directly from Montgomery’s grand jury testimony in a front-page scoop headlined “Sprinter Admitted Use of BALCO ‘Magic Potion’ ”:
Chronicle
on June 24, Fainaru-Wada and Williams quoted directly from Montgomery’s grand jury testimony in a front-page scoop headlined “Sprinter Admitted Use of BALCO ‘Magic Potion’ ”:
Tim Montgomery, the world’s fastest man, told a federal grand jury he used human growth hormone and a steroid-like “magic potion” provided by the alleged ringleader of the BALCO steroids scandal, the
Chronicle
has learned. The admission contradicts his recent public denials.
The reporters also revealed that Montgomery had implicated his and Jones’s former coach, Trevor Graham:
Montgomery testified that Graham provided steroids to athletes, including one-time shot-put champion C. J. Hunter, Jones’s ex-husband, who retired in 2000 after testing positive for steroids. Montgomery said Graham had a connection in Laredo, Texas, who got the drugs from a horse veterinarian in Mexico.
That prompted an emphatic rebuttal by Graham’s lawyer, Zeszotarski: “The accusations reported to be made by Mr. Montgomery in his grand jury testimony are false and baseless. Trevor Graham has never distributed steroids or any illicit substance to anyone, and is in no way involved in any such matters. Trevor has told the Government this fact, and has truthfully answered all of the Government’s questions.”
A separate article by the reporters the same day focused on what Montgomery had said about Barry Bonds:
Federal prosecutor Jeff Nedrow asked whether, on his visits to BALCO, Montgomery had seen any “traditional anabolic steroids,” as opposed to the “clear,” the substance he said Conte gave him in exchange for a ZMA endorsement. Montgomery replied that in a locker above BALCO’s weight room, Conte kept several steroids, including Winstrol, also known as stanozolol. . . . Montgomery said Conte didn’t give Winstrol to Olympians because it was so easily detected in drug screenings. “You would definitely get busted off of them steroids,” he testified. Instead, Montgomery said Conte gave Winstrol to athletes in sports in which drug testing was lax or nonexistent.“Mr. Conte has athletes from baseball to football to–professional bodybuilding to, to–you name it,” Montgomery said.“Any sport there is, Mr. Conte got someone in it . . . he would brag on Barry Bonds, he would brag on Ronnie Coleman,” he continued, referring to the 2003 “Mr. Olympia” bodybuilder.The prosecutor asked: “Did he say he gave any steroids, Winstrol or any of the other ones to Mr. Bonds?”“Yes, he did,” Montgomery replied.“Did he say specifically which ones?”“Winstrol,” Montgomery said.
The extensive quotations from Montgomery’s grand jury testimony were not only a bombshell for what they said about the use of steroids by some of America’s top athletes but also shattered the grand jury’s secrecy. It is a federal crime for any government lawyer or investigator to disclose grand jury testimony except in very limited circumstances. Copies of Montgomery’s testimony, as well as that of other grand jury witnesses, had been provided to defense counsel under a strict confidentiality agreement that all the lawyers had signed. Violating such an order would be criminal contempt of court.
The next day, Judge Illston ordered U.S. Attorney Ryan’s office to launch an investigation into the leak and report back in three weeks. Conte’s lawyers seized on the opportunity to accuse the government of improper leaking. Anderson’s lawyer called for a grand jury investigation into the leak and said the defendants were being denied their right to a fair trial. Troy Ellerman, Valente’s lawyer, told the
San Jose Mercury News
that “the government continues to leak information, and they continue to put their case together one lying idiot at a time,” and told the prosecutors they were “unadulterated punks.” The prosecutors, in turn, denied they were responsible.
San Jose Mercury News
that “the government continues to leak information, and they continue to put their case together one lying idiot at a time,” and told the prosecutors they were “unadulterated punks.” The prosecutors, in turn, denied they were responsible.
In their investigation, government lawyers questioned everyone from clerical workers to IRS agents to prosecutors and defense lawyers with access to the grand jury transcripts. They got nowhere. Everyone with access to the transcripts–two dozen people in all–signed declarations under penalties of perjury that they had not been the source of the leak. Someone had to be lying.
S
ince she was first identified as a BALCO client, Marion Jones had adopted an aggressive posture of denial. In May she attended an Olympic Team Media Summit in New York for star athletes expected to compete later that year at the Athens Summer Olympics. “I know that I’ve always been drug-free, I am drug-free and I want to continue to be drug-free,” she told reporters. She also went on the offensive, warning that “if I make the Olympic team, which I plan to do in Sacramento, and I am held from the Olympic Games because of something that somebody thought, you can pretty much expect that there will be lawsuits. I’m not just going to sit down and let someone or a group of people or an organization take away my livelihood because of a hunch, because of a thought, because of somebody who is trying to show their power.”
ince she was first identified as a BALCO client, Marion Jones had adopted an aggressive posture of denial. In May she attended an Olympic Team Media Summit in New York for star athletes expected to compete later that year at the Athens Summer Olympics. “I know that I’ve always been drug-free, I am drug-free and I want to continue to be drug-free,” she told reporters. She also went on the offensive, warning that “if I make the Olympic team, which I plan to do in Sacramento, and I am held from the Olympic Games because of something that somebody thought, you can pretty much expect that there will be lawsuits. I’m not just going to sit down and let someone or a group of people or an organization take away my livelihood because of a hunch, because of a thought, because of somebody who is trying to show their power.”
The campaign climaxed in June with publication of Jones’s autobiography,
Life in the Fast Lane
. The book contained the declaration “I am against performance-enhancing drugs. I have never taken them. I will never take them,” and the phrase appeared inside the book in large red capital letters. Jones described her shock and bewilderment when she learned from media reports that her husband, C. J. Hunter, had tested positive for steroids in Sydney. Without mentioning Trevor Graham by name, Jones also described an “anonymous coach” who sent the sample that was linked to BALCO, run by “C.J.’s pal Victor Conte.” She implied that she was an innocent bystander who’d been dragged into the BALCO affair only because of her relationship to Hunter.
Life in the Fast Lane
. The book contained the declaration “I am against performance-enhancing drugs. I have never taken them. I will never take them,” and the phrase appeared inside the book in large red capital letters. Jones described her shock and bewilderment when she learned from media reports that her husband, C. J. Hunter, had tested positive for steroids in Sydney. Without mentioning Trevor Graham by name, Jones also described an “anonymous coach” who sent the sample that was linked to BALCO, run by “C.J.’s pal Victor Conte.” She implied that she was an innocent bystander who’d been dragged into the BALCO affair only because of her relationship to Hunter.
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